Freedom

In which I offer my .02 on Franzen’s novel and welcome your views and a discussion!

I read The Corrections, reviewed it, liked parts of it, was ultimately dissatisfied and did not yearn for more, more more  Franzen. What I do remember is one particular passage which I have quoted and thought about frequently, not least during dinnertime battles:

His eyes went around and around his plate, but he had not been provident and there was nothing on the plate but woe.

The broader context of the scene is the battle between Chip’s parents – the dreadful meal of rutabagas and liver is an act of hostility from mother to father and in the end, he is left, forgotten.

It’s kind of scene that Franzen excels at, I think – revealing so much about his characters in a brief scene, cogent summary of a moment.

For example in Freedom, a couple of passages I marked as cogent and revelatory. The kind of writing I strive for but can never hope to achieve, I fear:

An adolescent flirts with an older rock musician:

Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence –the drama of being her—was registering.

A character reflects on what’s happened to two other characters who’ve become obsessed with an issue (overpopulation, as it happens):

They’d been seized by a notion and talked each other into believing it.  Had blown a bubble that had then broken free of reality and carried them away.  They didn’t seem to realize they were dwelling in a  world with a population of two.

and this, in which “she” is reading Toni Morrion’s Song of Solomon:

“I thought it was about slavery. Now I’m not even sure what it’s about.” She showed him two facing pages of dense prose. “The really funny thing? This is the second time I’m reading it. It’s on like half the syllabuses at Duke. Syllabi. And I still can’t figure out what the actual story is. You know, what actually happens to the characters.”

“I read Song of Solomon for school last year,” Joey said. “I thought it was pretty amazing. It’s like the best novel I ever read.”

She made a complicated face of indifference toward him and annoyance with her book.  He sat down across the table from her, took a bit of bagel and chewed it for a while, chewed it some more, and finally realized that swallowing was going to be an issue.  There was no hurry, however, since Jenna was still trying to read.

Okay, I loved that last passage. Why? First, because the voices are right. Franzen’s characters don’t all speak in the same way – which is why Patty’s “autobiography” is so frustrating.  Secondly, the snort-worthy little allusion to the herd mentality of higher education.  Third – the reason I highlighted the other sentences above. Franzen can capture a moment in spare, precise terms.  Not many words, but many, many layers. Fourth, it’s funny. Amuse me, she commanded.

There’s much of the same in Freedom, but also much of what I didn’t like in The Corrections. In fact,  most of what I wrote about the first book applies to the second. Just change the names of the characters and the issues of import – switch coal mining for biotech and think-tanks for Lithuanian politics and you’ve got it.

I’ll admit that I was put off by the book right away by something that struck me as rather important.  The first large section of the novel is offered as one character’s autobiographical writing.  She’s the female protagonist, a middle-aged woman, a former college athlete whose writing reads surprisingly like….Jonathon Franzen’s.  No attempt to write in another voice, distinct from the omniscient narrator who follows.  I don’t know. I found this a little shocking, actually. When I consider how deeply writers struggle to bring an authentic voice of disparate characters to a page, what Franzen did with Patty’s “autobiography”  seemed spectacularly lazy, even strange.

Franzen’s theme in both of his novels is, essentially, that there’s no use.  One generation’s attempts to “correct” the previous one are not only misguided but damaging.  The “freedom” our restless selves seek, our necks craning for a better view of the greenery on the other side, is equally self-deceptive, for in the end we end up right where we began.

It’s interesting because it’s a rather conservative message, isn’t it? And I don’t mean “conservative” politically, I just mean – conservative, as in staying put, in not straining for change.  It’s also tinged with a bit of hopelessness as we just race in our circles chasing illusions, pointlessly trying to fix our unfixable lives.

What renders this ultimately uninteresting to me is that the characters aren’t butting up against anything more than themselves and each other.  What I said about The Corrections applies here – big book, small story. Both novels feature idealists, but they are idealists whose causes are irrelevant, interchangeable.  There’s no transcendent, even incipient or glinting at the edges, nothing greater out there.  It’s hinted at sometimes. The struggle.

He was at once freer than he’d been since puberty and closer than he’d ever been to suicide.

You know me (some of you do) so you know it’s not tedious, glaring MEANING I seek, dots connected and all.  Or optimism. Or hope and change.

It’s just a sense that what happens to human beings really matters. Matters. With Franzen, I hardly ever feel that it does.

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